The Next Cool Tool for Twitter—Live Activity Heatmaps

Twitter, my obsession for the past few weeks, has a bunch of great third-party tools being developed for it as we speak. Twhirl, TweetStats, and MyMileMarker are a few examples of amazing creative ingenuity. There is still much uncharted territory that has yet to be explored. One tool I think that would receive a ton of exposure is a sort of live activity/heat map.

Think about it: how cool would it be to see a map of the entire world, and right after a huge news story (e.g. another earthquake), you are able to see where activity on Twitter picks up, and perhaps even have the application analyze keywords to create invidiaul groupings for that heatmap. If “earthquake” is contained in the tweet, it will be available as another heatmap, and then you can see the activity of where “earthquake” tweets are involved. I simply think this would be a fun tool to watch.

I would love to develop a tool like this, and if I was a programmer, this is what I’d be spending my time working on. Perhaps, any of you programmers watching this right now should consider developing a tool like this for Twitter. It is bound to explode in popularity, and I would be interested in testing it.